Top Revision Quotes

Favorite Revision Quotes

1. "The general will be joining us, shortly."[..] A Revision officer dropping the brother in front of a rank was the most threatening thing Sergei had heard in a long time. He stared at Nikishin, tried to read his features, but that was entirely impossible. Never before had Nikishin appeared more the arm of the law."Author: Aleksandr Voinov

2. "In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come."Author: Amor Towles

3. "I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it."Author: Amy Hempel

5. "Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing."Author: Bernard Malamud

6. "That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."Author: Bertrand Russell

7. "Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better."Author: Buffy Andrews

8. "But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language."Author: C.A.R. Hoare

9. "How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent?"Author: Carl Schmitt

10. "You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug."Author: Chila Woychik

11. "We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'."Author: Christopher Hitchens

12. "Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce."Author: Christopher Hitchens

13. "Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.Flash.Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!Flash."Author: Chuck Palahniuk

14. "Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity —that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good."Author: David Bentley Hart

15. "Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great."Author: David Gemmell

17. "It is a long revisionist road up from the bottom for George W. Bush. He is ranked toward the bottom rung of presidents."Author: Douglas Brinkley

18. "But as a German - and I am German-born - we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists."Author: Ernst Zundel

19. "Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art."Author: Gore Vidal

20. "I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions."Author: Ha Jin

21. "Time had the power to cancel all changes wrought by human artifice, overwriting all new revisions with further revisions, returning the flow to its original course"Author: Haruki Murakami

22. "History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past."Author: Heather Anastasiu

23. "A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual..."Author: Jacob Neusner

24. "I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule."Author: Jamaica Kincaid

25. "History only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe."Author: Janet Fitch

26. "But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.''Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action."Author: John Green

27. "My YouTube videos have literally millions of views... Yet I'm still airbrushed out of the BBC Stalinist revision of history; the chart shows have been instructed not to play my music!"Author: Jonathan King

30. "Then based on her own recent experience, the Divine Presence had a cruelly perverse sense of humor and His Grand Plan needed drastic revision."Author: Judith McNaught

31. "...the imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become."Author: Kathleen Norris

32. "That's the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows."Author: Kelly Barnhill

33. "This assumes an upward revision of the European Budget, which is precisely what Jacques Chirac refuses to do. On the contrary, he has demanded a reduction."Author: Laurent Fabius

34. "This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish."Author: Laurent Fabius

35. "There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ‘pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work."Author: Malcolm Cowley

36. "Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves."Author: Margaret Atwood

37. "After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months."Author: Margaret Haddix

38. "It is the Eve of Division; It is the Dawn of Revision. We did not come here to lose. We did not come here to be divided."Author: Mark O'Brien

39. "Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That's the reality, not George Bush's revisionist history!"Author: Mark Shields

40. "Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other."Author: Mary Douglas

41. "I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone."Author: Melissa De La Cruz

42. "He could have made it right with the book. But he hasn't. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied."Author: Monica Lewinsky

43. "I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group."Author: Patrick Rothfuss

44. "If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing."Author: Pearl S. Buck

45. "Walking out of an A level paper isn't funny.""It's not that I'm laughing at.""So what is it?""No one ever tells you when you're doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it's an option.""But it isn't an option.""It is, because I just took it."Author: Rosamund Lupton

46. "Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."Author: Samuel E. Morison

47. "Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words."Author: Siri Hustvedt

48. "All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"Author: T. E. Lawrence

49. "Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea."Author: T.S. Eliot

50. "Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing."Author: Vikram Seth